We NEED your support. More specifically, the author of this article needs your support. If you've been enjoying our content, you know that a lot of work goes into our stories and although it may be a work of passion, writers gotta eat. If just half our readers gave 1 DOLLAR a month, one measly dollar, we could fund all the work from StuChiu, DeKay, Emily, Andrew (and even Vince). If you contribute 5 DOLLARS a month, we invite you to join our Discord and hang with the team. We wouldn't bother you like this if we didn't need your help and you can feel good knowing that 100% of your donation goes to the writers. We'd really appreciate your support. After all, you're what makes all this happen. Learn more

Upsets in Overwatch

At Apex, there were two upsets in the playoff bracket. EnVyUS beat Rogue 3-2 and Kongdoo beat Lunatic-hai 3-0. The 3-0 is a bit misleading as all three were close games. I’m not too surprised by these results. First because I obviously don’t watch that much Overwatch (I only watch LANs and only when I’m free from watching CS:GO).

Here are the rest of the reasons:

Time. It is still extremely early in all of these team’s careers. None of these teams have been to LANs in the double digits yet. Because of that you can’t measure consistency of skill or the ability to adapt to patches.

Proliferation of online play. Online isn’t useless in trying to grade teams. But it has a much smaller correlation than people would hope. Especially as in an FPS title, precision and accuracy are extremely important factors to how well certain players do. San in SC2 was one of the best online players in the word from 2011-2012. He qualified fro a multitude of LANs by beating the best Korean players. He then instantly lost at the actual event. Selfless were an NA CS:GO team that did extremely well online despite their lack of name value and many thought they could translate that to LAN. Instead they got destroyed over and over and over. Sometimes it works out, like Cloud9 in CS:GO and their win at ESL PL and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s variable and not something you should put money on.

The patch. You can analyze the patch notes and theory craft as much as you want. but no one can ever completely predict how a patch will change a team dynamic or strategy. Idra, despite what you may think about his career had a very adept analytical mind for SC2. He thought the shortening of fungal time was a nerf to Zerg. As it turned out it was one of the key elements to creating the most imbalanced era ever in SC2 (so imbalanced, I’m pretty sure they now teach it in competitive game design school of what not to do). Rain, one of the all time greatest Protoss players believed that prior to 2014 we were headed to a Terran dominant era after that patch and it was going to be as terrible as bl/infestor. Instead we got one of the other most imbalanced eras in SC2 history known as the Blink Toss era.

Switching players. Talespin leaving was likely one of the catalysts of making EnVyUs beat rogue. That is because Mickey’s D.Va allowed him to annoy one of the Rogue players to no end. People assume (rightly) that some synergy/comms must be lost. But sometimes just a single change even without any preparation is the key to make a winning team. This is either because the mentalities get better, the patch is right or there is a natural chemistry. This happened in cS:GO when SK got TACO and fnx and got their best result up to that point by getting second in a large tournament. Even 1 player swap can completely change the dynamic of a team. Sometimes multiple player swaps changes nothing as we saw with FaZe (in CS:GO). They didn’t get successful until getting Karrigan.